Three Months of Dog Ownership

I’ve been investigating getting a dog since about senior year of college (= for the last 21 years). My SIL started harassing me (brutally) to get a dog earlier this year, plus it seems like a good time in life to stop not doing things for fear of unknown consequences. Ergo, I got a dog. Specifically, this one:

While as a college student, I’d really wanted a basenji (they can climb trees!), saner thought patterns prevailed this time around. Here are my notes regarding possible breeds:

Corgi: A lot of shedding.

Brittany Spaniel: Pretty good dog, apparently less high strung than the English springer spaniel, but still needs a lot of exercise. Needs grooming, but not as much as the springer. Sensitive (prefers quiet environment), more independent than springer, not many serious health issues. Tends to drool, doesn’t like being alone.

Mainly, I wanted to get a good dog that was trainable, could go hiking with me, and wasn’t going to suffer much from being left alone all day while I was at work.

Once I got to Utah, I started looking at KSL to get the lay of the land so to speak. There were actually a lot of Pembroke Welsh corgi breeders in the “general area”, but most of them were in Idaho, southern Utah, or Montana. Eventually there was a listing from Tremonton (about a half-hour from Logan) that popped up. A couple days after I saw it, I decided to go to PetSmart to see what I was up against with regard to having to acquire stuff. While there, I met a young couple with a very young corgi puppy and asked them where she had come from. It was the breeder in Tremonton. As a fatalistic Mormon, I took this as my sign and went out to visit the breeder a couple days later.

Before I did, though, I found a WikiHow article about how to pick the right puppy — it was actually pretty good, describing different “personality types” and implying that I should pick the one that acted most like the personality I thought I wanted. So I went out to Tremonton looking to find the one that fit the “Independent Thinker” stereotype.

The breeder had seven puppies left from a brood of ten.

My independent thinker is the one on the far right. The seventh dog is cowering in the dog house at left. My toe is at the bottom of the image.

Breeder owned both the parents, which I guess was (is?) good. The father dog, Jerry, was a little more personable than the mother, though also small for his gender (whereas the mother was pretty big for a girl corgi). Watching the puppies play for a while, there were a couple that stood out as the independent ones who weren’t too needy, too aggressive, or too submissive: the black-collared boy and the magenta-collared girl. (The needy one was a charmer though; I had to re-consult my articles to verify that I shouldn’t get the needy one.)

Anyway, took black and magenta out of the pen and played with them for a little while to see which I liked better. The girl was adventuresome and tried to climb up the slide on the breeder’s backyard swing-set; the boy waited till I wasn’t looking, then dug his sharp little puppy teeth into my back (he was also the biggest member of the litter, which something I read somewhere said wasn’t ideal). So: I chose the girl.

Only $900 later, we were on the way home:

She whined most of the way home and insisted on sitting in my lap for the majority of the ride.

Picking the girl dog, of course, introduced a major problem: girl dog names are pretty bad. This was the full list I came up with before settling on Aela (a Skyrim reference and a name I’m still not super-stoked over, but whatever, etc.):

Aela the Huntress

Delphine

Kaylee

Heighty

Rowsdower

Juniper

Fawkes

Cassandra

Artemis

Edeltraud

Crow

River

Montana

Brookie

Lake

Tarn

Mae

Daisy

Pixie

Jinx

Shadow

Reagan

Nyx

Harbinger

Gu?ri?ur

Cache

Xena

Samsa

Maybe

Moonbeam

Comet

Dee

Clover

Lorem

Taiga

Sky

Hebe

Ebb/Ebby

‘Cause then if I had another dog, that one could be named Ipsum and hilarity would ensue. Anyway, here are a few more early-days pics:

The other ear is up now fwiw.

Here are some stupid lists that make it seem like this post is intended to be a baby book for this dog (that I do, admittedly, kind of like).